...it was somewhat of a surprise when the Plumsted district's three schools became the test site for a cutting-edge eye recognition security system designed to keep out strangers.

"We're an appealing test site because we are a small community where everybody knows everybody," said Michael Dean, the schools' technology coordinator. "We're taking a rural town and asking, `What is John Q. Public's perception of this technology? What is people's comfort level - is this easy to use?'"...

Plumsted was among some 400 school districts that applied for a grant from the Justice Department for the iris recognition technology. The federal agency is building a database on school security and is using Plumsted as its first data collection...

More than 300 parents and nearly all the district's teachers and staff volunteered for Plumsted's two-month pilot project that began earlier this month...

Wendy Arzt, whose two daughters attend New Egypt Elementary School, lauded the technology as noninvasive and easy to use.

"We're fortunate to live in a small, safe town. But in this day and age, you can't take safety for granted," said Arzt, a substitute teacher taking part in the study.

But, what if a psycho holds a gun to a scanned person's head and forces them to help him get in? Or - even worse - what if he gouges a scanned person's eye out, and holds it up to the scanner.

Didn't think of that, did you?

No, it's obvious that a more thorough check is needed. Perhaps the next time, Wendy should put her DNA on file instead. When she wants to get in, a simple, quick DNA check would be performed via an anal probe. The probe would also check her various organs and various cardiopulmonary functions, skin galvinometry, adrenalin in her blood, illegal substances in her blood, etc. to determine whether the DNA sample was being taken from a live person or not. That way, we'd be certain to know that this was an actual live person not under duress. Then she could get into her school in this small, safe town. Don't worry, it's for the children.

Since we've already got that DNA on file, no sense letting it gather dust. We could give Wendy some helpful hints based on a quick analysis of it. Like, her various risk factors. All to help her lead a more healthy and safe life. And, if she had been living in the D.C. area some months back, and if we had been able to isolate a sniper gene, think how many lives would have been saved with a quick look through the files to eliminate her and other innocent parties as a suspect in the D.C. sniper case.

Compare the report from a few months back about a school in England which was going to use student's irises so they could be automatically charged for their lunch. See, some students get free lunches, and the wise school headmaster didn't want those students to be stigmatized. They were also going to use the iris-scanning as library cards.

See also the post about a company called Invidious Indivos which wants to replace credit cards with fingerprint scanners. One of their marketeers even came up with the genius idea of giving away a free hamburger to those who signed up for the service. It's working so far: they only had one customer with "'Mark of the Beast' phobia."

These are yet more examples of how public-private cooperation is making society great: note the government links in the New Jersey school story as well as the Invidious story.